Contemporary Genre's Homelessness

In Brooke Davis Anderson’s wall text for Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger,” she writes “By leaning into the boundaries of the Western canon, 'Dargerism' illustrates how one self-taught master has spawned a new movement, a wholly new ‘ism.’” Other wall text contradicts this spawning - Justine Kurland, for example, was photographing her nomadic waifs before she ever knew of Darger. And there are just too many artists not in this show who have been doing similar work for Darger alone to carry the weight of an “ism.” There is something that extends beyond him and into the fields nearby: In a broader Hegelian manner genre painting is making its appearance in contemporary art.

When Hegel writes about the period that he calls Romanticism, which for him emerges with what he refers to as “so-called genre,” it is the period in which Classical beauty is no longer appropriate to art. Spirit withdraws from nature in order to be intimate with itself, and at this time “the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone...does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.”* Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, 1426, marks a turn towards Christ as a particular individual, and subjectivity is now at home in the world. Idealism gives way to contingency - “romantic art leaves externality to go its own way again for its part freely and independently, and in this respect allows any and every material, down to flowers, trees and the commonest household gear, to enter the representation without hindrance even in its contingent natural existence.” In its capriciousness painting falls apart from the unity of classical sculpture and becomes divided among genre painting, landscape, still life and portaiture. One can even pick up on national differences - whereas German genre paintings can only reveal “snarling and vicious people,” Dutch paintings leave one in a jovial mood.***

Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece,1425-1428, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an excellent example of what Hegel means by being at home in the world. In the Annunciation God appears to Mary as a teeny cross-bearing figure, barely visible as compared to the gleaming copper pot in the background. This rather insignificant figure has flown through the window of the home where this particular man loves this particular woman, and in this love “everything else which by way of interests, circumstances and aims belongs otherwise to actual being and life, [is elevated] into an adornment of this emotion; it tugs everything into this sphere and assigns a value to it only in its relation thereto.”****

In Delia Brown's Autumn Morning, 2008, a fictitious child sits in the window of a well appointed home, a pile of Care Bears filling up the space of a roomy arm chair. In the exhibition "Precious,"false portraits of overly sweet mothers and daughters oozing with silk, pearls and flushing cheeks are staged fantasies caught in the impossible desires of women who never had children. The small scale of the paintings and the exaggerated plushness of being at home in the world is meant as a critique of painting's gendered terms, in which being too precious in one's work is never as serious as masculine austerity and scale. Similarly, Amy Cutler's miniature paintings of nomadic women from elsewhere- pictured above - carry their worlds upon their backs, with no ground below them or heaven above. Carrying their children and households with them as they go, contingent necessity is an adornment in an exotic world without men. Homeless genre enters the more conceptual strategy of Joy Garnett who retrieves images that grab her from the public domain and files them until she can no longer remember their context. Underscoring their placelessness she paints from these digital images in "one go," marking the gap in time and place with the spontaneity of painting.

Stephen Bann wrote that Pop Art was a return to genre as a “generic challenge to personal expression,”***** and it is also true that Gerhard Richter’s self-proclaimed banality was a response to Neo Expressionism. But in the New York ‘80s, also responding to Neo-Expressionism, there was not so much an interest in genre as there was in style - painters such as Sherrie Levine, Ross Bleckner and Philip Taafe, choosing from the work of Bridget Riley or Paul Feeley whose reception marked the problem of style, appropriated their motifs as their own. When genre occurred it was also in the sense of detaching oneself from its conventions and appropriating the style of another. Emphasizing culture above nature, April Gornik evokes Rockwell Kent in Pulling Moon, and in Light Before Heat, also from 1983, it is Fitz Hugh Lane. Genre painting in contemporary art existed, but at this time it had a relation to style that is no longer relevant in the same way.

It is perhaps symptomatic of this general mood that Jennifer Reeves creates characters out of painterly styles, appearing as though in the shift to the genre scene - as here in "Which way to the real deal?".

Currently at the Neuberger Museum of Art is “Future Tense,” the last of several genre exhibitions curated by Dede Young. Holding the recent work of 60 artists it is a landscape painting show, with the exception of a handful of artists working in other media. Striking is how very recent and varied these paintings are - many if not most are here by the courtesy of a gallery. Here is a brief interview excerpted from email exchanges:

CS: How do you find that your exhibitions of still life and landscape painting have informed an understanding of postmodern art? What is the role of genre for our time?
DY: The show supports the adaptability of traditional media to engage immediately relevant issues such as the environment, politics, over population and our use of non-renewable fossil fuel, the war over oil. The show pushes the tradition of landscape forward and reflects our time--all the work is post 9/11, and it demonstrates anxiety levels in this decade.
CS: I take your response to mean that there is nothing special about having a stake in genre, per se, that it exists, and reflects our time, but also that the shows that interested you during your research had nothing to do with genre, but environmental issues at large.
DY: You are correct: historic / traditional genres are a taproot that feed artists---the past is simply information upon which artists can draw. Genres are not relevant, per se, but are great fodder for artists to adapt and adopt. I am looking at how artists move forward and deflect the past. Today's artists cannot claim 'landscape' as a new idea, so how do they infuse it with contemporary relevance? The exhibition explores this, and today 'everything is environment.'

By this account, genre is an empty form for content, losing all its priveleges. For the purposes of "Future Tense" that is enough , but that there was so much to select from is really quite something. I don't need to list what has been visible, enough of it is around, enough to know that still life has been disqualified as sculpture and that history painting at this time has no identity as such unless it is bound to style. But there is now a genre painting in which the sense of being at home in the world has disappeared, and artists were drawn to Darger because of it. What I have gathered is by no means a summing up or an answer and the question still stands: What is the role of genre for our time?

By Catherine Spaeth

*Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, by G.W.F. Hegel, T.M. Knox, trans., Volume II, Oxford University Press, c. 1975, p. 519. First published posthumously in 1835 - Hegel died in 1830.
**Ibid., p. 527.
***Ibid., V. I, p. 169.
****Ibid., V I p. 563
*****Stephen Bann, “Pop Art and Genre,” New Literary History, Vol. 24, No. 1, Culture and Everyday Life (Winter 1993) pp. 115-124.

Image credits: Amy Cutler, Dwelling, 2005,Gouache on paper,22 x 30 inches,Copyright Amy Cutler, 2005, Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects; Robert Campin, Merode Altarpiece, 1425-1428, Met, courtesy of the world wide web; Delia Brown, Autumn Morning, 2008, 11x14”, oil on wood, Courtesy od D’Amelio-Terras Gallery; Joy Garnett, Harbor,2007,Oil on canvas,60" x 70",Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York; April Gornik, Pulling Moon, 1983, oil on canvas, 76x80”, Courtesy of Danese Gallery; Jennifer Reeves, Which way to the real deal?, 2005, Gouache on paper, 11 x 14 inches, courtesy of Ramis Barquet; Tomory Dodge, Salton Sargasso, 2005, oil on canvas, 90 X 85 inches, Courtesy of CRG Gallery; April Gornik, Light Before Heat, 1983, oil on canvas, 66 x 132 inches, courtesy of Danese Gallery, New York.

Catherine Spaeth